Philadelphia has suffered the highest rate of homicide per capita among America’s largest 15 cities since 2006 and the number of murders has risen each year since 2009. In 2012, 85 percent of the people killed in our city were shot to death.

In recent years, innovations in public health and criminology have led to double-digit reductions in gun violence in several other cities and corners of our own. But we are not doing enough.

Leaders say that everybody has to come together to end this epidemic, but there is no place to meet. We are building that community at GunCrisis.org.

The Gun Crisis Reporting Project — launched in March, 2012 — is an award-winning, independent, nonprofit journalism organization, designed to illuminate the epidemic of homicide by gunfire in Philadelphia — and to present solutions.

First, we meet the needs of citizens by providing original reporting on uncovered or under-covered gun violence incidents across Philadelphia, including the impact of gun violence for all stakeholders, in context and in a chronology that begins with root causes.

Next, we report on the groups and individuals pursuing possible solutions to end the epidemic of homicide by gunfire, and look for evidence of successful intervention in our city and beyond.

We avoid polarizing political debates on gun access, striving instead to support solutions that everyone can support. While others quarrel over the supply of guns, we hope to reduce the demand.

We engage community leaders, public officials, students and scholars in public forums, and engage online readers to participate in a conversation on solutions.

We support other violence prevention groups and events with publicity, social media and communications, a directory of service providers, event promotion and a public calendar.

We collaborate with local, national and international media to redirect gun violence reporting narratives to focus on solutions and the path to peace.

The catalyst behind our project was a conference on best practices for youth violence reporting, organized by the Dart Center for Journalism and Trauma and convened at WHYY in Philadelphia in 2011.

In addition, the core staff of the Gun Crisis Reporting Project is made up of four award-winning journalists with more than 50 combined years of reporting experience in Philadelphia.

We are further informed by our daily reporting process, meeting residents at crime scenes, participating in community events, reading about criminology, walking the streets with public health practitioners, meeting political leaders, scouring the media — and more.

We combine the best practices in peace journalism, trauma-informed journalism and social media journalism to create a solutions-driven approach to gun violence reporting.

Rather than simply reporting on each incident without context, we focus on the roots of violence, the chronology of the conflict, the path to peace and possibilities for community engagement.

Instead of simply telling stories, we strive to maintain open conversations across social media and help people in our community tell their own stories.

Employing digital technologies, we are building a network for peace as well as a body of knowledge.

Our first 1,000 blog posts covered 252 crime scenes, included 184 community reports and 101 reports on solutions. More than 92,000 site visitors have consumed almost 600,000 pages — and our social media community numbers in the thousands.

We lead discussions on gun violence solutions at Philadelphia City Council, Temple University, the University of Pennsylvania and more.

Our work has been featured by local, national and international media and earned numerous journalism awards.

Most importantly, year-to-date homicides are down by 40 percent in Philadelphia. We hope we made a difference.

We won’t celebrate before we can point to sustained reductions in gun violence, but we continue to quantify our impact step-by-step.

Attention is currency in digital media, and we are working to continue growing our online audience exponentially — to increase awareness of the epidemic of gun violence and to support and illuminate programs and organizations demonstrating success.

We hope to organize and participate in more public events and bring our communities together with elected officials. We hope to see informed civic engagement eventually lead to changes in funding, policy and practice that will contain and eliminate this epidemic.

To date, all professional services have been provided free of charge by our volunteer staff of award-winning journalists, most of whom have incurred enormous direct and indirect costs.

Recently, we enabled crowd-funding tools on our site and we have been humbled by the generosity of a small number of supporters, but those contributions have not come close to meeting our costs. We also have high hopes for a couple of small grants in the coming months.

Swarthmore and Haverford Colleges have provided us with interns at their expense, and a Swarthmore class helped with strategic planning. (Come back to hear more about our 2013 interns and summer staff in the near future.)

Next, we have several grant applications in the works, as well as plans for more aggressive crowd-funding, and we are presently developing a strategic plan for economic sustainability.

Bottom line: We need your help.

Please consider making a tax-deductible contribution to support the Gun Crisis Reporting Project right now. Help us lead the way to ending gun violence.

Thank you for your attention and concern for this critical issue. It doesn’t have to be this way, it won’t go on forever — and the harder we work, the sooner we will see the the end of this epidemic.